De.B. Dubois (*1985 Calcutta) is a writer, poet, design theoretician, dancer, actor and
visual artist. With her roots firmly in Bengal, Deb is now a Swiss national, living and
working in Switzerland where she practices visual arts, mentors students of design to
bridge theory and practice, and continues working as an inter-disciplinary design and
communications expert. Although her home tutoring in the field of fine arts started at
the tender age of five, officially she has been working and studying art and design in
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, Sydney, Paris and Basel – since 2005. An exponent of
modern Bengal, Deb has advanced quite a vast canon that comprises of paintings,
sketches and doodles, many poems, writings and some thousands of photographs.
As a brown-woman living equally in India and Switzerland, her main focus is on
gender, race and representation.

आईना – Mirror – আয়না

My art manifestation, as a Hindu Brahmin woman, is with the aim to hold up a mirror of reality in the face of the millions who refuse to acknowledge the fact that, ever since 2014, India has taken a quantum leap towards degradation. This is not limited to economics, but has much to do with the socio-cultural as well as the politico-economic degradation initiated by a people elected far-right government with no better agenda than to enforce traditional norms that are not only archaic and dangerous for the society and culture of India, but is also dangerous for women in India.

I want to stand, vulnerable and nude, in a public space for 30 minutes, with the
words – “why do I feel safe and comfortable while standing naked in Switzerland – but
fear death, rape, physical and verbal assault if I do the same in India?” written in black
paint all over my body.
In these 30 minutes, although I am limited to my pedestal of performance, I embody all
50million and more women who went missing in India. In these 30 minutes I embody the entire
societal stigma that starts with female foetus, and continues to haunt mothers of daughters,
women with strong-voice, independent women, women with short or long hair, women with
fair or dark complexion, tall or short women, fat or thin women, female body in general –
including its biological function of menstruation, and the list goes on! In my nudity, I stand as a
mirror to every virgin-whore dichotomy that society inflicts on us. And humbly and guiltily I
stand, for the innumerable number of women born in lower socio-economic strata in India
whose voices are being muted by men and women from the same socio-economic-religious
class as mine. I stand to point out that the privileged need to recognise their privilege and
stop nullifying cries of millions; – just because they don’t face these issues themselves, or are
too blinded within the comfort of their privileged bubble – does not mean that those issues are
invalid and/or will automatically go away. In those 30 minutes, I may seem vulnerable due to
my nude body, but inside I embody Kali – the goddess, – symbolic of darkness, of time, of
ultimate reality, and liberation.